the article you linked is about ads served in the browser
No it wasn't - Millenial Media measures the ad impressions based on its own app SDKs like the IOS app SDK
On Android apps are (I understand) predominantly ad-supported, while on iOS they are the exception rather than the rule.
Citation? It may be true or false, where are the figures?
I'd be very surprised if Apple wasn't caching these and downloading them in advance while connected to WiFi or syncing.
Possibly, but given that Android users on PAYG or limited data tariffs will be paying for adverts, it is likely that something similar is done there too.
The carriers might be against it, but they don't control the GSM specifications, that is down to the GSMA, and they have already formed a Task Force to look at the issue. The carriers are probably also against replaceable hardware SIM cards and unlocked phones - the only real reason such things are commonplace now was the fact that GSM was legislated as a single protocol within the E.U., and the GSM standard included the replaceable SIM card. I suspect that if the protocol hadn't have been legislated, the E.U. would have ended up with a different national network operator with incompatible networks in every country.
The firefox guys should've kept their versions at c.y instead of dropping the constant c, and everyone would've been happy. A number that changes scares people - but prefix it with a number that doesn't change and people are ok with it.
A blogger citing one instance of a handheld GPS system interfering with the plane-mounted one?
If you had read the article, you would have discovered that the "blogger" is in fact a writer for the New York Times and she was citing instances from a classified IATA report.
Gee, that's a whole lot of trouble given the last ~100 years of flying
Perhaps there are more planes and more personal electronic devices now than 100 years ago? Perhaps modern planes contain more electronic systems which may be subject to interference than older planes did?
"If my $36 phone from Radio Shack can bring down Air Force One, we have bigger problems than we thought."
What if the probability of interference is increased though? It's simple statistics, a 0.00001 chance of failure is unlikely to affect one particular aircraft, but given millions of flights, the probability of a failure occurring in any flight at all becomes likely. This is why the airplane industry is rather conservative when it comes to safety regulations.
NASA anonymous reporting system.... "So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call? Or if you were the captain in command of a B747 that unexpectedly lost autopilot after takeoff and did not get it back until 4, count 'em four passengers turned off their portable electronic devices?" http://christinenegroni.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/handhelds-on-airplanes-bigger-problem.html
"In 2007, one pilot recounted an instance when the navigational equipment on his Boeing 737 had failed after takeoff. A flight attendant told a passenger to turn off a hand-held GPS device and the problem on the flight deck went away." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/18devices.html
"Earlier this year, aviation journalist Christine Negroni obtained a copy of a confidential report from the International Air Transport Association that indicated the use of personal electronics on commercial aircraft had interfered with flight deck operations in 75 instances over the past seven years.
What kind of problems? I’m not sure you want to know. All cockpit systems were affected, flight controls, communication, navigation and emergency warnings. . . .
And
The use of PEDs [Personal Electronic Devices. –DS] on board will not – I repeat – will not cause a plane to go tumbling through the sky like something in a made-for-TV-disaster movie. What PEDs can and in fact have already done, is create a distraction for the flight crew. When that distraction comes at the wrong time it can lead to pants-wetting episodes and maybe even disaster. And that is why boys and girls, devices are supposed to be turned off as in OFF, below 10 thousand feet. The concept is that with sufficient altitude below us there is time to address any pesky error messages that might wind up being transmitted to the cockpit. Only now we know that those messages are pretty darn common."
He said "deprive the person of that property" not "use of that property". If someone intentionally breaks something of yours, that is criminal damage, not theft.
As far as we know, data encrypted with a random key and modern algorithms ought to be safe in the hands of the enemy. I say as far as we know, because the NSA does not reveal exactly what they can and can't crack. There is no practical way to brute force any of the modern algorithms: 256 bits is roughly equal to the number of atoms in the universe.
to charge someone having a particular belief system is wrong
Hate crimes don't prosecute people for having a particular belief system - they prosecute people for having committed crimes that were motivated by a particular belief system.
It's similar to terrorism. If you blow up a room full of people, then they are all dead whichever way you charge the perpetrator. But do you charge with 50 counts of murder, or terrorism plus murder? You could, as you say, ignore the "terrorism" and just use murder charges and consider the motivation during sentencing, but the legal system seems agreed that there is some value to treating terrorism as a specific act in itself. It can be argued either way.
The question of whether Hassan was a terrorist is more interesting than you probably give credit, and really comes down to what the definition of terrorism is. Consider "Hasan passed up several opportunities to shoot civilians, and instead focused on soldiers in uniform." If he intended to terrorise the population, why didn't he shoot the civilians? Did he actually see some wider political meaning to his attacks, that American soldiers would not feel safe anywhere? And if he considered himself part of an non-state army, then are soldiers a legitimate military target? Note that question is an important one - it always comes up in response in similar situations e.g. to give two contrasting examples: French resistance attacks on German soldiers, and IRA attacks on British soldiers. If during the American Revolution, a soldier serving in the British Army had decided that the actions of the British were wrong, and to ally himself with the Americans, and he then killed some fellow British soldiers, would he have been a terrorist?
There was a similar debate over the Norway attacks, when some people argued that the attacks weren't "terrorism", even though hours earlier they had called the attacks terrorism, but literally changed terminology when it was discovered that the attacker was a Christian and not a Muslim. This is a man who espoused a very specific political platform, planned his attacks over several years, and wrote a huge thesis demanding wider political change, and who thought that his attacks would effect that change, and yet there were still people who refused to label him as a "terrorist".
This kid did something stupid and he might get deported to a country he didn't grow up in, and might not know at all. Other kids do stupid stuff like this all the time (even resulting in injury or death), and if they get punished at all, don't get sent to an effectively unknown country.
Ravi is a citizen of India. He is not a citizen of the United States. This means he does not have the same rights that citizens have, and that he is subject to deportation under various circumstances. Now, there is certainly an argument that immigrants should treated more like legal citizens, and not be subject to deportation, but you are writing as if he is an American citizen, which he isn't.
You do realise that's exactly the same rationale that the Islamic extremist groups use to justify their attacks on civilian targets, right?
Perhaps you do not realise how naive you are being
You are both correct, because your argument does not refute the original.
Original: Some Islamic terrorist groups claim that attacks on civilians are justified because they are responsible of the actions of their governments (and for democratic nations, they may have a point)
You: Economic warfare kills more people than physical warfare.
The people of Iran voted for women's suffrage in 1963. That was a pretty socially forward thing to do - at this time African Americans were effectively disqualified from voting in many U.S. states, and interracial marriage was illegal in many states. Obviously things have changed in the U.S. since then. Imagine how Iran might similarly have changed, after five decades of democracy and universal suffrage.
And what do you think would happen to Tehran after this "oh-so-plausible" nuclear attack on Israel?
Chirac said it well: "Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed."
The idea that the Iranian government would start a nuclear war with Israel is ridiculous.
Oh, is that the oil being exported by the country that's so energy-starved it needs to develop nuclear power?
Totally discredited argument, even the U.S. government has conceded that burning oil to generate electricity would be stupid. This has been known for decades.
Libya [of 2009] has the highest standard of living anywhere.
Actually it ranks 70th. No doubt life was good for some people, but do you really think the average world citizen would have rather lived in Gadaffi's Libya than Switzerland or Norway?
London, which by the way has probably the worst air in the world
The worst in Europe, probably, but I doubt it comes close to the industrial cities of China. Which one would you rather live in?
Britain is by far the least democratic country I have ever been in.
Our Glorious Leaders decided they'd be America's lapdog and follow them in, without the rest of Europe. Without a vote on the issue.
At least two-thirds of the electorate supported the Iraq war. The figures for Afghanistan were much higher. A vote wouldn't have made any difference. "it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."
There are some huge projects that have been donated to the public domain - the Human Genome Project, the International HapMap Project, and there are smaller groups working in less commercialised sectors that release their data as public domain (Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration, Wellcome Trust,..).
The problem is that there hasn't traditionally been a path to market for academic institutions and others conducting basic research, and that bringing a drug to market often costs more than the basic research, since you have to pay for human clinical trials and regulatory approval. For these reasons, the system has evolved whereby basic research is funded by the tax payer, the initial studies are funded by the tax payer, and then at some point everything is handed over to external corporations to commercialise. This is a big problem, because from this point onward the company is in a monopoly position, and has little incentive to lower costs for the patient (in fact, they have a strong motivation to raise costs for the end user whilst minimising their own costs). This might change in the next few years, as commercial pressures are prompting companies to drop research funding (Traditional drug-discovery model ripe for reform)
Keep in mind that, before the internet, it was a lot harder to do collaborative globally distributed research. The big question is whether the lessons/success of the "open source" model can be applied to parts of the research community in a way that still enables drugs to come to market. I'm pretty sure that it is possible, if the right model is discovered - e.g. collaboratively funded or X-Prize style systems for achieving basic research goals, leading to public domain data and drug designs, which can then be manufactured by drug corporations and sold for profit. The key to success is not about mandating that a particular solution should be used, but in creating a system that encourages both collaboration and competition in the respective areas where these work best.
Bacteria doesn't grow in honey, heating it will make no difference except making it easier to pour. You can pour honey straight from supermarket jar into fermenter and it will be fine.
The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire.
That sounds like a fermentation step - open fermentation with wild yeast - not a sterilisation step. That disclaimer is odd: "Never, ever try to reproduce this recipe using the methods described. Wild fermentation is never advisable, if you are lucky you will simply get very very ill, if not death or fates worth than death could await those foolish enough to drink a beverage fermented in the open air." Funny, that is how the commercial breweries did it for centuries.
You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected
When I first started brewing I was like this. I would measure during the boil, and make sure I added exactly the right amount of extract or water to hit the target. And then I stopped caring, and brewing became more fun. It is so much easier to not bother, and it really makes not that much difference if your beer comes out at 4.5% or 4.9%. The little bits of randomness are what makes every batch unique. I barely even bother measuring water consumption these days, just 25l at the start, and I switched to Brew In A Bag, and the beer still comes out fine. Turbo mead cider: take a few litres of apple juice, add a couple of kilos of honey, and yeast. Wait a few days, and (optionally) drink straight from the fermenter. Lazy brewing: it's great.
There are two points to consider with the whole Arab Spring Islamist thing:
1) The Islamist groups were often the only form of resistance against an unpopular dictator. People joining or supporting those groups weren't necessarily hardcore Islamists. Consider that the Islamist groups that fought against Gadaffi turned out to be our allies, and openly called for democratic elections. Also consider the Polish uprisings against Communism - the uprisings had many religious overtones (martyrdom, use of the Christian cross etc.) and many of the protests were overtly religious, and the protesters used the church to organise, but in the end they did this because the church was already a focal point in people's lives, one that people could rally around as a community. They didn't actually want a hardline religious society. This may also be the case with the Arab Spring.
2) The Islamist political groups that have been elected in these kind of situations in the past tend not to fare so well in future elections. The basic problem is that once they are in power people discover that the Islamist politicians are much like politicians everywhere, i.e. entirely fallable and often hypocritical. In the end, linking religion to a political group not only reduces respect for the group, but also for the religion as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the size of the ad when you fucking click on it, not the size of the ad banner that you get served, you dimwit.
That is not what the article says, in fact people are specifically calling out Apple's video adverts as being bandwidth hogs.
the article you linked is about ads served in the browser
No it wasn't - Millenial Media measures the ad impressions based on its own app SDKs like the IOS app SDK
On Android apps are (I understand) predominantly ad-supported, while on iOS they are the exception rather than the rule.
Citation? It may be true or false, where are the figures?
I'd be very surprised if Apple wasn't caching these and downloading them in advance while connected to WiFi or syncing.
Possibly, but given that Android users on PAYG or limited data tariffs will be paying for adverts, it is likely that something similar is done there too.
The carriers might be against it, but they don't control the GSM specifications, that is down to the GSMA, and they have already formed a Task Force to look at the issue. The carriers are probably also against replaceable hardware SIM cards and unlocked phones - the only real reason such things are commonplace now was the fact that GSM was legislated as a single protocol within the E.U., and the GSM standard included the replaceable SIM card. I suspect that if the protocol hadn't have been legislated, the E.U. would have ended up with a different national network operator with incompatible networks in every country.
Plus it has to serve up all those mobile ads
You write as if the iPhone is immune to advertising. It isn't. When It Comes to Mobile Advertising, iPhone Still the Biggest Target Average iAd size has been estimated at 5MB: "Assuming 5MB per iAd, this means that, under AT&T’s new data plan, the user has to pay to watch an ad. Either 40 cents or 6 cents depending on the package."
so it might still use more data though not to the user's benefit
That study didn't include iPhone, but obviously iPhone apps with adverts are also going to consume more energy.
The firefox guys should've kept their versions at c.y instead of dropping the constant c, and everyone would've been happy. A number that changes scares people - but prefix it with a number that doesn't change and people are ok with it.
A blogger citing one instance of a handheld GPS system interfering with the plane-mounted one?
If you had read the article, you would have discovered that the "blogger" is in fact a writer for the New York Times and she was citing instances from a classified IATA report.
Gee, that's a whole lot of trouble given the last ~100 years of flying
Perhaps there are more planes and more personal electronic devices now than 100 years ago? Perhaps modern planes contain more electronic systems which may be subject to interference than older planes did?
"If my $36 phone from Radio Shack can bring down Air Force One, we have bigger problems than we thought."
What if the probability of interference is increased though? It's simple statistics, a 0.00001 chance of failure is unlikely to affect one particular aircraft, but given millions of flights, the probability of a failure occurring in any flight at all becomes likely. This is why the airplane industry is rather conservative when it comes to safety regulations.
NASA anonymous reporting system.... "So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call? Or if you were the captain in command of a B747 that unexpectedly lost autopilot after takeoff and did not get it back until 4, count 'em four passengers turned off their portable electronic devices?" http://christinenegroni.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/handhelds-on-airplanes-bigger-problem.html
"In 2007, one pilot recounted an instance when the navigational equipment on his Boeing 737 had failed after takeoff. A flight attendant told a passenger to turn off a hand-held GPS device and the problem on the flight deck went away." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/18devices.html
"Earlier this year, aviation journalist Christine Negroni obtained a copy of a confidential report from the International Air Transport Association that indicated the use of personal electronics on commercial aircraft had interfered with flight deck operations in 75 instances over the past seven years.
What kind of problems? I’m not sure you want to know. All cockpit systems were affected, flight controls, communication, navigation and emergency warnings. . . .
And
The use of PEDs [Personal Electronic Devices. –DS] on board will not – I repeat – will not cause a plane to go tumbling through the sky like something in a made-for-TV-disaster movie. What PEDs can and in fact have already done, is create a distraction for the flight crew. When that distraction comes at the wrong time it can lead to pants-wetting episodes and maybe even disaster. And that is why boys and girls, devices are supposed to be turned off as in OFF, below 10 thousand feet. The concept is that with sufficient altitude below us there is time to address any pesky error messages that might wind up being transmitted to the cockpit. Only now we know that those messages are pretty darn common."
Handhelds on Airplanes a Bigger Problem Than You Think
He said "deprive the person of that property" not "use of that property". If someone intentionally breaks something of yours, that is criminal damage, not theft.
As far as we know, data encrypted with a random key and modern algorithms ought to be safe in the hands of the enemy. I say as far as we know, because the NSA does not reveal exactly what they can and can't crack. There is no practical way to brute force any of the modern algorithms: 256 bits is roughly equal to the number of atoms in the universe.
to charge someone having a particular belief system is wrong
Hate crimes don't prosecute people for having a particular belief system - they prosecute people for having committed crimes that were motivated by a particular belief system.
It's similar to terrorism. If you blow up a room full of people, then they are all dead whichever way you charge the perpetrator. But do you charge with 50 counts of murder, or terrorism plus murder? You could, as you say, ignore the "terrorism" and just use murder charges and consider the motivation during sentencing, but the legal system seems agreed that there is some value to treating terrorism as a specific act in itself. It can be argued either way.
You may find this article interesting: Is Terrorism a Crime or an Aggravating Factor in Sentencing?
The question of whether Hassan was a terrorist is more interesting than you probably give credit, and really comes down to what the definition of terrorism is. Consider "Hasan passed up several opportunities to shoot civilians, and instead focused on soldiers in uniform." If he intended to terrorise the population, why didn't he shoot the civilians? Did he actually see some wider political meaning to his attacks, that American soldiers would not feel safe anywhere? And if he considered himself part of an non-state army, then are soldiers a legitimate military target? Note that question is an important one - it always comes up in response in similar situations e.g. to give two contrasting examples: French resistance attacks on German soldiers, and IRA attacks on British soldiers. If during the American Revolution, a soldier serving in the British Army had decided that the actions of the British were wrong, and to ally himself with the Americans, and he then killed some fellow British soldiers, would he have been a terrorist?
There was a similar debate over the Norway attacks, when some people argued that the attacks weren't "terrorism", even though hours earlier they had called the attacks terrorism, but literally changed terminology when it was discovered that the attacker was a Christian and not a Muslim. This is a man who espoused a very specific political platform, planned his attacks over several years, and wrote a huge thesis demanding wider political change, and who thought that his attacks would effect that change, and yet there were still people who refused to label him as a "terrorist".
This kid did something stupid and he might get deported to a country he didn't grow up in, and might not know at all. Other kids do stupid stuff like this all the time (even resulting in injury or death), and if they get punished at all, don't get sent to an effectively unknown country.
Ravi is a citizen of India. He is not a citizen of the United States. This means he does not have the same rights that citizens have, and that he is subject to deportation under various circumstances. Now, there is certainly an argument that immigrants should treated more like legal citizens, and not be subject to deportation, but you are writing as if he is an American citizen, which he isn't.
You do realise that's exactly the same rationale that the Islamic extremist groups use to justify their attacks on civilian targets, right?
Perhaps you do not realise how naive you are being
You are both correct, because your argument does not refute the original.
Original: Some Islamic terrorist groups claim that attacks on civilians are justified because they are responsible of the actions of their governments (and for democratic nations, they may have a point)
You: Economic warfare kills more people than physical warfare.
without significant cultural reform, which takes generations
Iran: In 1963, a referendum overwhelmingly approved by voters gave women the right to vote.
The people of Iran voted for women's suffrage in 1963. That was a pretty socially forward thing to do - at this time African Americans were effectively disqualified from voting in many U.S. states, and interracial marriage was illegal in many states. Obviously things have changed in the U.S. since then. Imagine how Iran might similarly have changed, after five decades of democracy and universal suffrage.
And what do you think would happen to Tehran after this "oh-so-plausible" nuclear attack on Israel?
Chirac said it well: "Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed."
The idea that the Iranian government would start a nuclear war with Israel is ridiculous.
Oh, is that the oil being exported by the country that's so energy-starved it needs to develop nuclear power?
Totally discredited argument, even the U.S. government has conceded that burning oil to generate electricity would be stupid. This has been known for decades.
Right now, the U.S., either directly or via Mossad, is backing terrorist groups in Iran that are murdering scientists.
People in glass houses...
Libya [of 2009] has the highest standard of living anywhere.
Actually it ranks 70th. No doubt life was good for some people, but do you really think the average world citizen would have rather lived in Gadaffi's Libya than Switzerland or Norway?
London, which by the way has probably the worst air in the world
The worst in Europe, probably, but I doubt it comes close to the industrial cities of China. Which one would you rather live in?
Britain is by far the least democratic country I have ever been in.
UK is rated 18th.
Our Glorious Leaders decided they'd be America's lapdog and follow them in, without the rest of Europe. Without a vote on the issue.
At least two-thirds of the electorate supported the Iraq war. The figures for Afghanistan were much higher. A vote wouldn't have made any difference. "it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."
You do realise that Jerusalem is considered by Muslims to be a holy city? No, thought not...
Brazil already imports Efavirenz from India. Efavirenz is the anti-HIV drug that the Brazilian government compulsorily licensed.
There are some huge projects that have been donated to the public domain - the Human Genome Project, the International HapMap Project, and there are smaller groups working in less commercialised sectors that release their data as public domain (Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration, Wellcome Trust, ..).
The problem is that there hasn't traditionally been a path to market for academic institutions and others conducting basic research, and that bringing a drug to market often costs more than the basic research, since you have to pay for human clinical trials and regulatory approval. For these reasons, the system has evolved whereby basic research is funded by the tax payer, the initial studies are funded by the tax payer, and then at some point everything is handed over to external corporations to commercialise. This is a big problem, because from this point onward the company is in a monopoly position, and has little incentive to lower costs for the patient (in fact, they have a strong motivation to raise costs for the end user whilst minimising their own costs). This might change in the next few years, as commercial pressures are prompting companies to drop research funding (Traditional drug-discovery model ripe for reform)
Keep in mind that, before the internet, it was a lot harder to do collaborative globally distributed research. The big question is whether the lessons/success of the "open source" model can be applied to parts of the research community in a way that still enables drugs to come to market. I'm pretty sure that it is possible, if the right model is discovered - e.g. collaboratively funded or X-Prize style systems for achieving basic research goals, leading to public domain data and drug designs, which can then be manufactured by drug corporations and sold for profit. The key to success is not about mandating that a particular solution should be used, but in creating a system that encourages both collaboration and competition in the respective areas where these work best.
The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days, and then left on a shelf near the fire.
That sounds like a fermentation step - open fermentation with wild yeast - not a sterilisation step. That disclaimer is odd: "Never, ever try to reproduce this recipe using the methods described. Wild fermentation is never advisable, if you are lucky you will simply get very very ill, if not death or fates worth than death could await those foolish enough to drink a beverage fermented in the open air." Funny, that is how the commercial breweries did it for centuries.
You want to hit your target gravities to get your beer to come out as expected
When I first started brewing I was like this. I would measure during the boil, and make sure I added exactly the right amount of extract or water to hit the target. And then I stopped caring, and brewing became more fun. It is so much easier to not bother, and it really makes not that much difference if your beer comes out at 4.5% or 4.9%. The little bits of randomness are what makes every batch unique. I barely even bother measuring water consumption these days, just 25l at the start, and I switched to Brew In A Bag, and the beer still comes out fine. Turbo mead cider: take a few litres of apple juice, add a couple of kilos of honey, and yeast. Wait a few days, and (optionally) drink straight from the fermenter. Lazy brewing: it's great.
There are two points to consider with the whole Arab Spring Islamist thing:
1) The Islamist groups were often the only form of resistance against an unpopular dictator. People joining or supporting those groups weren't necessarily hardcore Islamists. Consider that the Islamist groups that fought against Gadaffi turned out to be our allies, and openly called for democratic elections. Also consider the Polish uprisings against Communism - the uprisings had many religious overtones (martyrdom, use of the Christian cross etc.) and many of the protests were overtly religious, and the protesters used the church to organise, but in the end they did this because the church was already a focal point in people's lives, one that people could rally around as a community. They didn't actually want a hardline religious society. This may also be the case with the Arab Spring.
2) The Islamist political groups that have been elected in these kind of situations in the past tend not to fare so well in future elections. The basic problem is that once they are in power people discover that the Islamist politicians are much like politicians everywhere, i.e. entirely fallable and often hypocritical. In the end, linking religion to a political group not only reduces respect for the group, but also for the religion as a whole.